The Only Thing Constant Is Change: The New Trinidad and Tobago Biennial Music Festival 2020!

With an aim to truly modernising our
festival, this edition of the Biennial Music Festival introduced several
significant changes. Change is never easy, but we are confident that
competitors and public alike will be pleased with the direction of our beloved
festival.

Perhaps the biggest changes are with
our classes poring over the classes and to determine which classes to keep and
which classes to shelve for the time being. The decision to put aside classes
was based on interest in the classes over our past festivals. Whenever a class
was heavily undersubscribed, we considered culling it from our offering, at
least for now. Our administrative
committee are music lovers too and some of our personal favourite classes
didn’t seem feasible anymore. These include the operatic ensemble, two piano
duets, vocal trios, composition, sight-reading and chamber ensemble. We also
took into account changes on the local music landscape and not duplicate the
good work of performing arts groups, like the Picoplat Young Artists’
Collective which has been doing remarkable work with opera and operatta. Of
course, there are other underserved areas on the musical landscape. But there’s
hope for them because we plan to have special developmental activities to
revive such art forms. In order words, the absence or removal of a class
doesn’t mean that it isn’t important. Rather, it means that we see the need for
giving the area special more concerted attention outside of the month-long
festival.

The second major change that we can
highlight relates to our judging. Traditionally the festival relied upon two or
three foreign adjudicators for semi-final and preliminary rounds of
competition. Accredited adjudicators
give our festival a good level of objectivity and rigour that aims at ensure
that our local talent matches international standards. However, this approach is costly because it
means that we not only have to fly in our visitors from other parts of the
world (often the UK, US or Canada) and pay their fees for an entire month. It’s
no secret that Trinidad and Tobago doesn’t have the kind of money that we had
just a few years ago. We usually receive a subvention from the government to run
our festival and rely on sponsors, and as the economy takes a hit, so does our
funding. But the work must go on. In order to reduce adjudication costs, we are
carefully selecting a panel of well-qualified local adjudicators for special
musical disciplines and will use them to judge the semi-final rounds while
using our foreign adjudicators for the championship rounds. Beyond reducing the
cost of our festival, we will help to develop local adjudication standards. The
presence of our foreign adjudicators for the championship (or final rounds)
ensures that the element of foreign standards is maintained.

Finally, we have registration, where we
have introduced a simple online system.
Once competitors have registered online using the links on our Facebook
and web pages, payment can be made into the respective regional account. Once
evidence of payment is sent to the regional office, registration is complete.
This eliminates the need of competitors and teachers to have to make their ways
to our physical office by a specific deadline, rushing against traffic, hot sun
and rain.

None of these changes is without its
challenges. As challenging as they might be to patrons and competitors, they
are to us the administrators and organisers. We therefore ask that you be patient
as we get the mix right and move towards to future without leaving behind the
good things from the past that make us who we are.